Quantum Dialogue showed how verbal arguments of Niels Bohr and his antirealist Copenhagen school of scientists convinced the scientific world that his interpretation of quantum mechanics was the only possible one.

Beller argues that Bohr's rhetoric about epistemological certainties convinced the young world of quantum physicists that his complementarity principle contained a deep, philosophical, even metaphysical truth that explains wave-particle duality.

A central Copenhagen tenet that a quantum object is either a wave or a particle, depending on the free choice of the experimenter.

Sadly, Beller never mentions Einstein's simple explanation in 1909 that the wave is the probability of finding the particle.

It is true that the choice of what to measure, for example the z-component of electron spin, "brings into existence" that z-component, as either +1/2 or -1/2. And it makes x- and y-components indeterminate. Paul Dirac said that the random choice between +1/2 or -1/2 was "Nature's choice." This is the ontological chance discovered by Einstein in 1916.

Werner Heisenberg was right that the experimenter's free choice creates an element of reality.

But Bohr generalized Heisenberg's view to claim nothing happens until a physicist makes a measurement. which is absurdly anthropocentric.

Beller attacks the Copenhagen Interpretation as "riddled with vacillations, about-faces, and inconsistencies." She asks

How does one construct from among these numerous contradictory arguments a narrative that seems to irrevocably imply the pillars of the Copenhagen dogma? How does one reconstruct history so that the central tenets of the Copenhagen interpretation, such as indeterminism and the impossibility of an objective, observer-independent description, seem not merely highly persuasive but outright inevitable?...

I contend that all the Copenhagen arguments of "inevitability" are in fact fallacious—they rely either on circular reasoning or on highly appealing but misleading metaphorical imagery. They are strongly supported by falsified history, which renders certain developments as dictated by the inner logic of the development of ideas. Discrediting the opposition and caricaturing the opposition's criticism of the Copenhagen stand is yet another potent rhetorical device to strengthen the orthodoxy. These chapters reveal how fruitfully ambiguous and wisely uncommitted interpretive efforts are concealed by rigid reconstructed stories. Complex, many-voiced, multidirectional theorizing is thus conflated into an orthodox, one-dimensional narrative.

"History is written by winners"—this cliché finds powerful confirmation in the case of the quantum revolution. We have numerous reminiscences by the winners—Bohr, Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, and others. There are hardly any reminiscences by Einstein and Schrödinger about the same events—we do not hear the opposition's side of the story. In the quantum revolution, the orthodox constructed the narrative, eliminating dissident voices and largely suppressing the crucial contributions of the opposition and of lesser scientists... I describe the strategies by which the past is manipulated in order to make the winners look naturally right. By such a reconstruction of the past, the cornerstones of the Copenhagen interpretation—quantum jumps, the impossibility of causal space-time models, indeterminism, and wave- particle complementarity—were even more firmly entrenched.